The communities of Mount Fuji’s north slope (Kitafuji) welcome the IASC to the next global conference, to be held on their resource commons at Kitafuji during 3-7 June 2013. This will be the first IASC meeting sponsored directly by resource users and commoners – that is, holders of common access rights [called iriaiken 入会権, or “enter-meet-rights” in Japanese]– and the first IASC meeting to be held on a commons. The Kitafuji commoners are organized into a federation of eleven former villages called Onshirin, which is sponsoring the IASC meeting along with Japan’s Research Institute for Humanity and Nature (RIHN), based in Kyoto. The conference venue in Fujiyoshida City is easily reached from Tokyo’s international airport at Narita, and the very favorable timing in the first week of June offers both Mount Fuji’s sunniest weather and off-season pricing. This spectacular location – Mount Fuji was nominated this year as a world heritage site to UNESCO – with sponsorship from the Kitafuji commoners will surely make this a wonderful meeting with unique features. The meeting offers high participation by resource commoners and members of the sponsoring communities; ample opportunities for exchange and sharing among scholars, practitioners, and resource users; extraordinary field trips to commons of all types; as well as exposure to Japanese cultural traditions, folkways on the commons, and Japan’s long history of experience and struggle to protect the commons.
Several formats are available for participation:
PRE-CONFERENCE WORKSHOPS; POLICY FORUMS (FORA); PANELS; ROUND TABLES;POSTERS; VIDEO PRESENTATIONS.
Deadlines
Submission of Abstracts (papers, panels, posters, videos, round tables): 30 September 2012;
Notification to proposers of acceptance for program: mid-November 2012
Early registration (reduced rate - Participants must register by the early bird deadline in order to be assured that their names can be included in the final printed program): 15 April 2013
Submission of finished papers (Participants must submit their papers by this date in order to have their papers included in the flash drive of all conference papers that will be distributed with registration materials): 15 April 2013
Standard registration: 15 May 2013
TataKelola dan KamSiber Kecerdasan Buatan v022.pdf
IASC's 14th GLOBAL CONFERENCE - Kitafuji brochure 2012 (A4 size)
1. IASC’S 14TH GLOBAL CONFERENCE, 3-7 JUNE 2013, MOUNT FUJI, JAPAN
COMMONERS AND THE CHANGING COMMONS: LIVELIHOODS, ENVIRONMENTAL
SECURITY, AND SHARED KNOWLEDGE
The communities of Mount Fuji’s north slope (Kitafuji) welcome the IASC to the next global
conference, to be held on their resource commons at Kitafuji during 3-7 June 2013. This will be
the first IASC meeting sponsored directly by resource users and commoners – that is, holders of
common access rights [called iriaiken 入会権, or “enter-meet-rights” in Japanese]– and the first
IASC meeting to be held on a commons. The Kitafuji commoners are organized into a federation of
eleven former villages called Onshirin, which is sponsoring the IASC meeting along with Japan’s
Research Institute for Humanity and Nature (RIHN), based in Kyoto. The conference venue in
Fujiyoshida City is easily reached from Tokyo’s international airport at Narita, and the very
favorable timing in the first week of June offers both Mount Fuji’s sunniest weather and off-season
pricing. This spectacular location – Mount Fuji was nominated this year as a world heritage site to
UNESCO – with sponsorship from the Kitafuji commoners will surely make this a wonderful
meeting with unique features. The meeting offers high participation by resource commoners and
members of the sponsoring communities; ample opportunities for exchange and sharing among
scholars, practitioners, and resource users; extraordinary field trips to commons of all types; as
well as exposure to Japanese cultural traditions, folkways on the commons, and Japan’s long history
of experience and struggle to protect the commons.
Several formats are available for participation:
PRE-CONFERENCE WORKSHOPS: Most IASC meetings are preceded by workshops
offered on themes in which we anticipate there will be considerable interest among both
well-established members of IASC and new researchers as well as resource commoners.
Successful topics for these workshops include commons theory, the history of commons in
the host country (Japan of course), game theory and laboratory experiments, research
design, and law and commons.
POLICY FORUMS (FORA): Some sessions will deal with current policy issues that relate
to the commons, offering the opportunity to combine theory with practice.
PANELS: Organizations and researchers are encouraged to form their own clusters of
papers exploring different aspects of the same theme or topic. Please limit your panels to
a maximum of four papers. Please submit abstracts for the panel itself (a maximum of 300
words) as well as of the papers in your panel (also a maximum of 300 words each).
CALL FOR PAPERS, KITAFUJI CONFERENCE OF IASC, 3-7 JUNE 2013 PAGE 1
2. INDIVIDUAL PAPERS: Researchers may submit abstracts for an individual paper, which
the Program Committee will group into panels consisting of related papers that
complement each other. Please submit abstracts of up to 300 words with up to 5 keywords
as provided for on the conference website. Final papers should be between 6,000 and
10,000 words.
ROUND TABLES: At Kitafuji we hope to encourage discussion and to include resource
commoners and resource stakeholders in the dialogue. We encourage researchers and
practitioners to submit proposals for round tables, whose members might speak with each
other and especially with the audience rather than present written papers. We have
additional suggestions later in this handout. If you have a proposal for a round table,
please contact the Program Committee via info@iasc2013.org.
POSTERS: These are graphic displays for which verbal explanation and the amount of
time that a PowerPoint slide can be displayed are insufficient. We encourage people with
material that requires visual presentation (graphs, charts, photographs) and thoughtful
viewing of these visual materials to propose posters for the conference. By having
graphics (photographs, graphs and charts, diagrams) displayed in such a way that
viewers can take adequate time to appreciate them, and discuss them with the presenter,
we hope that posters will add a visual participatory element to the program. Posters will
be displayed in public areas where they will receive ample attention in addition to time
budgeted for poster sessions. We will have good facilities at Kitafuji for displaying
posters in the lobby and corridor where we will have sessions, and we will be able to take
our coffee breaks in those public spaces. Thus we can engineer an arrangement by which
posters receive frequent and careful viewing by everyone in attendance at the conference.
We will accept only the number of posters that can be displayed and viewed under highly
favorable conditions. Proposers of posters need to submit an explanation (maximum of
300 words) of the suitability for visual presentation of their proposal as well as a
conventional abstract (also maximum of 300 words) of the content of their presentation.
VIDEO PRESENTATIONS: The program will include dedicated time for video
presentations in which the producer or director of the film may introduce the work in
addition to screening it. We also hope to show a feature-length film (with English
subtitles) on the struggle spanning four generations to save the commons in Kotsunagi.
Please submit an abs tract (maximum of 300 words) describing the content and message,
conclusion, or findings of your video.
DEADLINES
30 September 2012
Submission of Abstracts (papers, panels, posters, videos, round tables):
Notification to proposers of acceptance for program: mid-November 2012
Early registration (reduced rate): 15 April 2013
Participants must register by the early bird deadline in order to be assured that their names can be
included in the final printed program
Submission of finished papers: 15 April 2013
Participants must submit their papers by this date in order to have their papers included in the flash
drive of all conference papers that will be distributed with registration materials.
Standard registration: 15 May 2013
CALL FOR PAPERS, KITAFUJI CONFERENCE OF IASC, 3-7 JUNE 2013 PAGE 2
3. TRAVEL FUNDS
We hope to offer funding for some of the accepted participants, depending on the criteria
required by those who provide funds for this purpose. We will post applications for travel funding
at a later time.
DISCUSSION OF CONFERENCE THEME –
COMMONERS AND THE CHANGING COMMONS: LIVELIHOODS, ENVIRONMENTAL
SECURITY, AND SHARED KNOWLEDGE
Naturally, the IASC welcomes proposals for panels, papers, and posters on all topics
related to the commons, but the location of this meeting in Japan and on Mount Fuji, as well as the
sponsorship by commoners who themselves have struggled to maintain their commons through
150 years of regime change, economic transformation, and political assault suggests certain
themes for emphasis, reflected in the conference title, “Commoners and the Changing Commons:
Livelihoods, Environmental Security, and Shared Knowledge.” Japan’s role in having a long history
with well-documented management of commons, in maintaining these commons while becoming a
technologically sophisticated economic power, and its recent confrontation with both natural
disaster and energy crisis also move us to highlight certain themes, though of course as always
there are no limitations on the geographic coverage of the meeting. The Kitafuji conference will be
a wonderful opportunity to consider the economic and social functions of commons with very
long history as they move through the processes of legal change, industrialization, and
urbanization. Do commons assist commoners or their societies in the process of economic
change? How do the economic and social contributions from common resources change through
the process of economic development? What environmental services and amenities do protected
commons contribute to the society around them as industrialization proceeds?
We can also look at the contemporary functions of commons in affluent post-
industrialism. If commoners in developing countries protect their commons during economic
development, what will they end up with and what does the commons do – and not do -- for them?
What is the role of commons in urbanized areas? Do industrialization and new technologies in an
affluent society create demand for new kinds of commons? The history of the commons as well as
current events around the world encourage us to consider the importance of protest as a tool for
expressing collective dissent and exerting influence on outcomes. Nowhere in the world are
commons protected through sheer luck; resource users and beneficiaries of commons must
always mobilize to protect their commons. What factors influence the tactics and strategies that
seem most successful? What advice can commoners with successful experience offer to others
involved in more formative struggles? We might also ask if this experience at mobilizing and
managing shared resources creates a capacity to cooperate with some bearing on response
to crisis. Does historical experience building social capital through the management of
common-pool resources improve the resilience of communities and their resource base in dealing
with high variability in the natural environment or with human-made crises? In turn, what does
recurrent crisis do to the commons?
Finally, our international meetings are always an occasion for examining global
commons – resources that require joint effort of all or most peoples and in affect all or most
peoples. Do rising concerns about global challenges offer new purposes and value to local
commons? Can local commons contribute usefully to changing energy profiles or enhanced
sustainability of local economies? Can local commons help us in meeting or reducing our need
for energy, with constructive impact on global climate change? New global commons
include some that have the non-rival or non-subtractable character of pure public goods rather
than the subtractable or rival qualities of common-pool goods. Although the institutions for
managing these goods would have to be different in some ways, cooperation to solve the inherent
collective action problems in both is necessary. Does historical experience with cooperation to
manage local common-pool goods offer useful guidance for building institutions for managing
CALL FOR PAPERS, KITAFUJI CONFERENCE OF IASC, 3-7 JUNE 2013 PAGE 3
4. new commons, whether digital, genetic, biophysical, or cultural?
Of course, as a meeting with special emphasis on the commoners, who in the case of a
global conference are the participants who attend the meeting, we welcome all proposals. But the
Program Committee would like particularly to suggest the following sub-themes in our call for
abstracts of panels, papers, and posters. A vital goal for an international meeting is of course
mutual discussion, in all directions, and this is particularly true at a meeting with sponsorship by
commoners and high participation from commoners. We would like to ask that those who
propose panels, papers, posters, and round tables consider interaction and discussion with the
audience in the design of their proposals.
SUBTHEMES
1. Commons and Social Capital for Livelihood Security in Crisis
Smoothly-functioning commons go hand in hand with substantial reserves of social capital,
but the ultimate test of that social capital is whether it can serve the community in a time of
crisis. Does social capital help with sharing sacrifice as well as with sharing benefits of
cooperative effort? Traditionally, many commons functioned to provide backup during
disaster -- do the physical resources of the commons provide emergency sustenance and
relief for communities? Do communities exposed over a long historical record to frequent
difficulties (severe bouts of economic hardship, highly variable climate, monsoons and
droughts, or even a high rate of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions) develop skills at
cooperation and community-building more frequently than other societies? Do such skills
emerge in the form of robust commons and/or high levels of social capital? Conversely,
what is the impact of these difficulties on the commons?
2. Commercialization and the Commons
Many, though certainly not all, commons were traditionally managed to support subsistence
living, and the arrival of commercial demand for sale of products from the commons to
buyers beyond the community placed pressure on the commons. Yet the potential profit
from sales could also be an incentive to protect rather than mine the commons in order to
generate sustainable flows of such income well into the future. The contradictory evidence
on this point demands historical and comparative investigation. When does commercial
pressure stimulate the formation and careful management of commons? When does
commercial pressure undermine sustainable extraction and lead to overharvesting that can
destroy the commons? Are there differences between “manageable” types of commercial
demand and “unacceptable” types? Are there defensive strategies that communities can
adopt to manage demand and the temptation to overharvest in the ace of these strong
external pressures? Can we draw lessons from new commons to apply to tangible resource
commons, or vice versa? How does commercial demand for genetic resources post special
challenges with respect to governance, risk, and ethics?
3. Urban Commons
We can think of urban commons in two ways – first, we might see urban infrastructure and
networks of waterways, sewers, electricity grids, and transportation as commons that are
shared, knowingly or otherwise, by urban citizens. Think of the circulatory or lymphatic
systems in the human body – these do their work, operating as intact systems, whether we
know or observe this work or not, yet they require care and maintenance, and their
performance is a joint result of all contributions to quality and performance. Second, urban
areas contain in their midst smaller well-defined commons, both physical and social, from
neighborhood parks and community centers to neighborhood associations and homeowner
associations. How are urban commons governed? Why is there a trend toward “private
urban governance” in some countries? How does past experience in other commons affect
the ability of urbanites to develop new urban commons?
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5. 4. Collisions in Law and Culture
We typically see many difficult conflicts between indigenous people and states, between
village custom and formal state law, between indigenous concepts of property rights and
resource knowledge and newer or foreign or imported ideas about rights and resources.
How has the collision between traditional or historically-rooted notions of resources and
ownership, and promoters of new “modern” (?) institutions and modes of economic
production affected transformations on the commons? How do communities that do not have
a traditional concept we might call “ownership” achieve recognition of their claims when
negotiating with governments that have very different concepts of resources and ownership?
What new legal forms have been created to accommodate rights to the commons? What is
the impact of these various new legal forms on use and protection of the commons during
economic modernization? What does “modernization” of rights turn out to mean – does it
vacate, weaken, or strengthen these rights?
5. Mobile Resources and Fluid Spaces:
Mobile resources, whether visible or invisible, aquatic or land-based, tangible or digital,
pose special problems for managing the commons. The physical expanse occupied by
migratory animals (birds, fish, grazers) can change over time and can even be invisible.
Herders must move their herds in order to tread “lightly” on available grazing lands, so
mobility is crucial to the survival of most pastoralists. How can resource users secure rights
to resources that must move? How do we overlap systems of mobile use through open space
on top of systems with fixed boundaries? How do we manage monitoring and enforcement
when resources are mobile or the spaces in which they move are themselves fluid or
intangible?
6. Equity and Distributive Justice within the Commons:
Communities managing their commons differ a great deal in their internal arrangements to
make decisions, divide benefits, apportion labor, and choose leaders. Some opt for direct
democracy, some delegate decisions to a few representatives, some have “bosses,” and
some practice strict equality. Often with “modernization” comes an externally-driven push to
create uniformity among and even within different communities. What can we learn from
deep historical analysis about why some commons regimes develop internal hierarchy and a
“boss” system of local elites while others do not? Over time, what seems to be the basis of
the leaders’ legitimacy in hierarchical regimes? What different historical conditions drive
other communities to practice internal democracy or to opt for egalitarian distribution of
benefits and duties? What is the impact on community cohesion of different distribution
rules? What is the impact of asymmetries within the collectivity on the group’s ability to
cooperate, on its ability to get the group’s work done, on members’ sense of fairness? How
do different communities define internal distributive justice? Are there noticeable trends
over historical time in how commons communities function internally? Is there a relationship
between how communities function internally and how they relate to higher authority? Are
groups with “bosses” more easily co-opted than egalitarian groups, or does having an
internal elite provide a bulwark against assault from the outside?
7. State-Society Relations and the Protest Politics of Commons:
Very few common property regimes emerge without considerable struggle over historic
time by the commoners to convert their claims into more robust rights. They may have to
deal with invaders from other areas and with governments that might prefer to nationalize
resources or to grant concessions from the commons to their supporters. We are reminded
by the story of Kitafuji, as well as by Arab Spring and the Occupy movement, of the important
role that protest plays in changing outcomes. Local and national governments may interfere
with commons management in several ways – aiming to confiscate the resource, seeing the
resource as government property so demanding royalties on extraction of resources,
attempting to limit the autonomy of communities managing the resource, or even wanting to
interfere in relationships within communities as they manage the commons (perhaps
claiming the right to appoint leaders, veto decisions, set up preferred decision-making
arrangements, or allocate benefits from the commons). How do state-commons or state-
community relationships affect management of the resource, community survival, economic
CALL FOR PAPERS, KITAFUJI CONFERENCE OF IASC, 3-7 JUNE 2013 PAGE 5
6. and environmental outcomes? Under what conditions do communities bargain successfully
with states? What conditions produce co-management, and under what circumstances do
communities find co-management to be an acceptable outcome?
8. Commons and Complexity
Commons that (i) are physically large, (ii) involve many people, (iii) generate an assortment
of common-pool goods with varying attributes or produced over different scales, and (iv)
collide or overlap with multiple layers of formal government are so complex that they elude
our understanding. How do we simultaneously manage resources with different traits in the
same space? How do nested commons function? Are there effective and ineffective ways to
organize this nesting? Is multi-level governance for complex commons at multiple scales
efficient or effective? What are the options available when problems arise with multi-level
governance? Does multi-layered governance for complex commons multiply points of
conflict and total difficulty, or does this layering displace and even mitigate conflict?
9. Commons as Local Energy Sources and Carbon Storage affecting Climate Change
Our need to sequester more carbon and burn less of it and to conserve energy often leads to
calls for reduced transportation of fuel and materials and tighter connections between
production and consumption. Do resource commons offer a way to localize solutions and
enhance sustainability? Can commons serve as local sources of biofuels and electricity co-
generation, as renewable sources of other materials, and as local destinations for waste?
Since global results are simply the sum of local effort and local results, we need to subdivide
global goals into local efforts that can be monitored. Can commons serve as the venue for
monitoring and enforcing local limits on fuel use, conservation, and emissions to enable us to
achieve globally desirable results in climate change? Does our need to build local
contributions to global goals mean that we really need to be reviving communities and
commons as front-line environmental managers for a planet in jeopardy?
Global Commons:
Global commons like the oceans and the atmosphere are well-recognized even if not well
understood, but new global commons emerge all the time along with our changing definition
and appreciation of what is a resource. We encourage proposals on global commons but
particularly want to highlight the following three challenging areas in which the very
character and distribution of the resources, what we find useful and valuable about them, and
the size of the community with an interest in these resources are moving incredibly fast.
Three specific subthemes of interest on the global commons follow:
10. The Global Digital Commons:
New technologies have created completely new resources (from radio waves to
geostationary orbits to bandwidth) for which we are struggling to create appropriate
institutional arrangements. Some of these technologies have rapidly converted resources
that used to be the monopoly of powerful elites into information readily available around the
globe (digital information traveling via the internet), so that a child holding a smart phone
now has access to more information than all that the intelligence services of the world’s
superpowers could muster just two decades ago. The debate over intellectual property – the
ownership of information and cultural production – is vigorous and heated. How can humans
cope with knowledge, information, proprietary knowledge and technology, so as to promote
innovation, preserve valuable knowledge, and gain the greatest available social (planetary)
benefit from information?
11. Biodiversity and Genetic Resources as Commons:
We are becoming more keenly appreciative of genetic resources (both genomes and
species) that were not “owned” in any classic sense before by anyone but have now become
valuable and subject to contestation and claims by many. How do we manage the
“biodiversity commons”? How do we conserve genetic resources and species? What
institutional arrangements can be created to govern the production and sale of new genetic
material through genetically modified organisms?
CALL FOR PAPERS, KITAFUJI CONFERENCE OF IASC, 3-7 JUNE 2013 PAGE 6
7. 12. Cultural Commons with Non-Consumptive Uses
Cultural resources of certain types are as endangered as species –cultural production like
language, folklore, and historical memory of dwindling populations -- but are also of interest
and value not only to the dwindling populations that created them but to all of us. And other
cultural resources that were once thought to be quite appropriately the personal property of
a narrow elite (the Taj Mahal, the Forbidden City in Beijing, the funeral pyramids at Giza) are
now claimed by millions and even billions as their heritage too. Viewscapes, landscapes
and ecosystem habitat that we want not only for wildlife to live in but to see ourselves;
cultural production like language and music, belief systems of indigenous knowledge and
cultural rituals and festivals; historically and culturally precious components of the built
environment, natural and human-made world heritage sites – all of these are commons that
we increasingly value for non-consumptive uses. How can we create arrangements to protect
these commons – very old, but newly appreciated by a wider global community? Under what
conditions are governance arrangements for non-consumptive use effective at conserving
this global heritage? Are our uses of these resources really non-consumptive or non-
subtractable?
13. Campaigning On the Commons: Practical Lessons and Strategy
Commoners, researchers, and other observers have many years of experience from which
we can now distill lessons about practical methods and strategies for dealing with the
political environment surrounding a commons. Under what conditions do various methods
prove successful or faulty? When are campaigns for the commons effective? What tactics
help and what tactics put commons campaigns at risk? What are the pitfalls the commons
campaigners encounter? How do campaigns for the commons resemble or differ from other
kinds of campaigning and activism? How do political and social contexts affect which
strategies work well?
14. Advancing research on the commons: methods, comparable data, and theoretical
research frontiers
What has been the relationship in the past between theoretical advances and empirical
information about the commons? How do the qualities of the resource itself -- fugitive or
stationary, subtractable or non-rival, self-reproducing (wildlife) or not (historical
monuments) – affect the institutions we need for managing these resources? Our theory must
become intimately conversant with these distinctions in order to develop effective and
efficient institutional designs. Game theoretic understandings of cooperation and free-riders
underlie most work on the commons by explaining the fundamental dilemma, but how can
game theoretic analysis and formal modeling offer additional insights? How have laboratory
experiments, on cooperation or other issues, advanced the study of the commons, and what
additional contributions can this approach offer? How have the resources of the digital age –
the information commons! – be used to promote advances in the study of other commons?
How can our studies of individual cases be cumulated as the foundation for generalizations
and theory-building? In what areas can the study of commons advance social science theory,
and conversely in what ways can existing theory from the social sciences improve the way
we study the commons?
CALL FOR PAPERS, KITAFUJI CONFERENCE OF IASC, 3-7 JUNE 2013 PAGE 7
8. ROUND TABLES
Round tables are a special type of panel, with the focus on discussion and exchange rather than
presentations, and can be suggested by program committee or drawn from paper and panel
proposals. Kitafuji conference is IASC’s first meeting ON a commons and the first meeting
sponsored BY commoners who are eager to share their experiences and to learn from scholars as
well as commoners from around the world. This meeting is a particularly appropriate occasion for
round-table exchange, but not just within members of the round-table. Please maximize the
opportunity for drawing in participation and discussion from the audience at all round tables. We
welcome all topics, and offer a few suggestions below:
Can commoners who have lost resources, or protected and maintained them, as the
surrounding economies industrialized, offer advice to those in other countries embarking on
similar journeys?)
What advice, warnings, or encouragement can commoners offer each other on
• dealing with formal “modernization” of property rights regimes;
• effective methods of preventing/protesting against government land grab;
• managing ecotourism to increase local income and employment without
environmental damage;
• finding new uses for traditional commons; and
• transforming commons from traditional support for livelihoods and environments
to new methods of support for livelihoods and environments.
• organizing internally to maintain cohesion and also to transmit the commons
legacy to the next generation of commoners
CONFERENCE CO-CHAIRS
TOMOYA AKIMICHI
Research Institute for Humanity and Nature, Kyoto, Japan
Professor Akimichi is a leading scholar of marine commons in Japan and Southeast
Asia, having conducted ecological, anthropological, and maritime anthropological
research in Asia and the Pacific. His most recent work focuses on the ecological-
historical study of interactions between humans and nature. Professor Akimichi
first attended an IASCP meeting in 1993 in Manila. He was formerly based at
Japan’s National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka, and is now affiliated with the
Research Institute for Humanity and Nature in Kyoto, where he has also served as
Deputy Director.
MARGARET MCKEAN
Department of Political Science and Nicholas School of the Environment, Duke
University, Durham, North Carolina, USA
Professor McKean began her work on the commons by studying the Kitafuji
commons in Japan, and is delighted to see our 14th conference take place on that
same commons. She was a member of the National Academy of Sciences panel on
Common Property and Environmental Management in the 1980s. She was a
founding member of the IASC/IASCP in 1989 and organized the first global
conference of the Association, in 1990 at Duke University.
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9. CONFERENCE HOSTS
ONSHIRIN
Onshore Regional Public Organization is a governmental unit created to protect common land,
originally held free and clear by commoners, that then passed through ownership of the imperial
family and prefectural governments during Japan’s political transformation of the 19th century.
Below the north slope of Mount Fuji sits Lake Yamanaka, below the western slope sits Lake
Kawaguchi, and scattered across these lands are the 11 villages that have traditionally managed
this commons. There are also additional expanses of land that are managed by 1, 2 or 3 villages
at a time, including the Lake Yamanaka Commons Group, which also manages a single-village
commons owned in the name of Yamanaka Sengen Shrine. Through centuries of struggle, the
commoners of this area have successfully persuaded the courts (1736), the Japan’s new Meiji
government (1911, 1917) and even the Japanese military (1973) to acknowledge their common
access rights even on land that has been formally captured by government (1889, 1936). Onshirin,
as an administrative body governed by a legislative assembly of commoners, is the present-day
embodiment of the 11-village commoner organization that managed the northern and western
slopes of Mount Fuji for several centuries. .
RESEARCH INSTITUTE FOR HUMANITY AND NATURE
The Research Institute for Humanity and Nature was established in April 2001 by the government
of Japan as an inter-university research institute to promote integrated research in the field of
global environmental studies. It is a unique research institute working in a field of urgent global
concern. RIHN’s objective is to define, conduct and debate integrative research capable of
describing the true dynamism of Earth phenomena and humanity’s place in it. To this end, RIHN
solicits, funds, and hosts fixed-term research projects on key areas of interaction between
humanity and nature. In 2011 RIHN celebrated its first decade of activity. Publication of the RIHN
Encyclopedia of Global Environmental Studies demonstrates RIHN’s impressive accomplishments
in the realm of cognitive science to date. In the next decade, RIHN has identified several key tasks
that are critical to the progress of contemporary environmental studies and reaffirms its
commitment to conduct coordinated, problem-centered, context-specific, innovative, and multi-
dimensional society-science research projects.
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10. CONFERENCE VENUE
The conference will take place in Fujiyoshida City, Yamanashi Prefecture, Japan, at various venues
on, in sight of, or representing the Kitafuji commons. Formal sessions will take place at the
Fujiyoshida Citizens’ Hall and the Fuji Calm Resort. This area is easily reached from both of
Tokyo’s International Airports (Narita and Haneda) using either trains (using the Chuo Line to
Fujisan station) or Fuji Express buses.
The North Fuji Commons in June, as seen from the conference venue at Fuji Calm.
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